News

Upper West Side CERT’s Tenth Anniversary Celebration, scheduled for March 1, 2017, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., at the American Museum of Natural History, is just around the corner. Bill Ritter, WABC-TV News anchor, will emcee the program. We expect this event to sell out, so register now. A few tickets are still available but they’re going fast.

UPDATE! Owing to circumstances outside our control, the date for this event had to be changed. It will now take place on March 1, 2017. The location and other details remain the same. Invitations will be emailed via Eventbrite in January.

On November 9, 2016, Upper West Side CERT will begin its 10th year with a celebratory event, hosted by the American Museum of Natural History. The gathering will kick off a year of neighborhood activities designed to raise awareness about emergency preparedness and increase community involvement.

Invited special guests to the Upper West Side CERT 10th Anniversary Celebration include NYC Emergency Management Department Commissioner Joseph Esposito, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Council Member Helen Rosenthal, Community Board 7 District Manager Penny Ryan, and officials from the FDNY and the 20th and 24th precincts of the NYPD. Sponsoring businesses will also be honored.

CERT graduate Laurel Douglas shows off her new gear, January 2007.

It was in November 2006 that a group of concerned Upper West Siders gathered at the Young Israel Temple on West 91 Street to begin an 11-week training that would certify them for their role as preparedness educators and second responders. Their class was graduated in January 2007 and has been pursuing its mission ever since.

For those new to our work, CERT citizen volunteer teams support the city’s first responders – FDNY, NYPD, and EMT – in their work to keep our city safe. We are deployed to provide a variety of services when disaster strikes, including crowd management, traffic control, and emergency relief. Our equally important mission is to educate our neighbors about how to keep themselves and their communities safe.

Upper West Side CERT has won a coveted place on the 2016 PBNYC6 (Participatory Budgeting for New York City, District 6) ballot to win funding for the purchase of a team van.

The UWS CERT Emergency Response and Education Vehicle is one of fourteen projects to be considered for funding by the District 6 public during PBNYC voting week, March 26 through April 3, 2016. But let’s back up a bit.

What is Participatory Budgeting?
PB is a democratic process that lets community members decide how to spend part of an annual budget allocated for their district. The total budget for participating Council Districts across the city in FY2016 is $30 million.

District 6 will receive $6 million in discretionary funding, of which $1 million will be spent by the community on projects they deem worthwhile.

PB is grassroots democracy in action. It enables community members to have a say in how their tax dollars are spent. It offers them – either through participation on the PB Committee or voting for the funding recipients – the opportunity to be directly involved in the District’s budgeting process. It results in better funding decisions, because who knows better the needs of a community than the people who live there?

We Want to Bring Emergency Preparedness to You.
Upper West Side CERT, looking to take its emergency preparedness education and outreach to the next level, applied for a small slice of this $1 million pie to purchase a van for the team. Happily, the PB screening committees and the New York City Council agreed that the project had merit and chose it as one of fourteen finalists.

Should our project place in the top five, it will be funded.

The van would have a threefold purpose: It would store the team’s emergency materials and supplies; it would bring pop-up preparedness events to street fairs, schools, and community gatherings; and it could be made available, if deployed by NYCEMD, at the site of a disaster.

In a recognition ceremony last night, Upper West Side CERT (M7) was presented with the 2015 Citywide Deployment Award by Commissioner Joseph J. Esposito and the NYC Emergency Management Department. The award recognizes the team’s outstanding performance in responding to recent crises, including the East Village and East Harlem gas explosion disasters, and the Ebola outbreak. M7 team chief, Sheldon Fine, accepted the award on behalf of his team and commended them in his remarks.

In addition to the awards presentations, 75 new CERT graduates of the Cycle 24 training received their certificates. They and 17 graduates of the new Teen CERT program, who attend the Urban Assembly School for Emergency Management, were welcomed into the CERT family.

About Us

Upper West Side Community Emergency Response Team (UWS CERT) are trained and certified citizen volunteers organized to provide auxiliary support to the emergency response efforts of the New York Police and Fire Departments of Manhattan's Upper West Side